saints, pagans, and the wonders of the east: the medieval imaginaryand its manuscript ... · the...

SAINTS, PAGANS, AND THE WONDERS OF THE EAST: THEMEDIEVAL IMAGINARYAND ITS MANUSCRIPT CONTEXTS

BY JOHN ELDEVIK

Studies about Christian perceptions of Islam and other non-Christian cultures in theMiddle Ages in recent years have tended to focus on individual authors and theirworks. New research in the field of manuscript philology, particularly its focus onthe idea of the “whole book,” however, suggests some new interpretive vistas thatcan sharpen our understanding of how medieval readers engaged with, and respondedto, texts about the non-Christian Other. This article takes as its subject a twelfth-century miscellany manuscript from the Westfalian monastery of Grafschaft thatconstitutes a remarkable dossier of hagiographical and exegetical texts relating toMuslims, pagans, and holy war. This codex, Darmstadt Universitäts- und Landes-bibliothek, Cod. 749, offers a window onto how works dealing with these subjects wereread not only on their own terms, but in dynamic relationship to one another. Focus-ing on the associative resonances between the different works in a single manuscriptallows us to understand how one monastic community in northern Germany sought toplace the twelfth-century Crusades in a broader historical and theological context.The results of such an approach complicate the traditional Christian-Muslimbinary we usually encounter in studies of Crusading or medieval views of non-Chris-tians, underscoring how one community of medieval readers thought about theproblem of religious conflict in several temporal, geographic, and conceptualdimensions.

At some point in the mid- to late twelfth century, the monastery of Grafschaftin Westfalia produced a nondescript manuscript containing a unique collection oftheological, hagiographical, and literary works. Housed today in the DarmstadtUniversitäts- und Landesbibliothek, this miscellany brought together a numberof texts that constitute a complex reflection on the politics and theology ofholy war in the wake of the Second Crusade, and in particular the so-calledWendish Crusade of 1147–49. The contents include works such as HrabanusMaurus’s commentaries on Esther and Judith, the vita of emperor Henry II,the Passion of Archbishop Thiemo (a Bavarian prelate killed on the Crusade of1101), and the so-called Magdeburg Crusade Letter.1 The contents of Darmstadt,

The research for this article was supported by the Hamilton College Dean of Faculty and theInstitute for Medieval Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in cooperation with theERC AdG Project SCIRE (No. 269591). I thank in particular Walter Pohl, Max Diesenberger,Christina Glassner, and Franz Lackner at the Institute for their assistance and support. I alsothank participants in the October 2013 California Medieval History Seminar and Prof.Suzanne Yeager for their insightful comments and critiques on an earlier version of this paper.

1 Die Handschriften der Hessischen Landes- und Hochschulbibliothek Darmstadt, ed. KurtHans Staub and Hermann Knaus, vol. 4 (Wiesbaden, 1979), no. 110, pp. 176–79. The

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Cod. 749 — and in particular the copy of the Passion of Archbishop Thiemo (BHL8232) it contains — reveal how one local monastic institution in northernGermany might have sifted its inheritance of theological, historical, and hagio-graphical writings in an attempt to explore and understand sanctified violencein both the Slavic East and in the Crusades to the Holy Land.2 Indeed, the inter-play of these texts suggests that its compiler(s) were looking at ways of under-standing these conflicts in dynamic relationship with one another.

The postcolonial turn in cultural and historical studies over the past gener-ation, along with the growing field of Crusade studies, has produced a rich bodyof scholarship on medieval “orientalism” and the construction of the culturalOther in the literary and historiographical traditions of the Latin West.3 Whilemuch of this scholarship has been focused on the Mediterranean, the frontiersof Northern Europe and Scandinavia have also received due attention in recentyears as environments that produced important textual reflections on religiousand ethnic identity during successive waves of Latin European expansion.4

Together, however, all these studies have tended to rely principally on close,richly contextualized readings of individual authors or texts — such as theChanson de Roland or Helmold of Bosau’s Chronica Sclavorum — that elucidateprocesses of Christian identity formation and the transmission of certain imagesof Islam, pagans, or other non-European peoples and places. At the same time,the turn towards “manuscript philology” over the past twenty years hasopened up a number of new interpretive vistas, both in history and literary

contents are also discussed in detail by Wilhelm Wattenbach, “Handschriftliches II. Codexbibl. Darmstadt 749,” Neues Archiv 7 (1882): 621–29.

2 For an older assessment, see the collection of essays in Heidenmission und Kreuzzugsge-danke in der deutschen Ostpolitik des Mittelalters, ed. Helmut Beumann (Darmstadt, 1963;repr. 1973).

3 Several essential works now include: John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the MedievalEuropean Imagination (New York, 2002); Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: MedievalRomance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York, 2003); Sharon Kinoshita, MedievalBoundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature (Philadelphia, 2006); SuzanneConklin Akbari, Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the East, 1100–1450 (Ithaca, 2009); and most recently Jerald C. Frakes, Vernacular and Latin Literary Dis-courses of the Muslim Other in Medieval Germany (New York, 2011). For a theoretical orien-tation, see the important collection of essays in The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. JeffreyJerome Cohen (New York, 2000).

4 Latin European expansion into Eastern Europe and the Baltic is given equal treatmentwith the Mediterranean expansion in Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Col-onization, and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton, 1993). See more recently, David Fraes-dorff, Der barbarische Norden: Vorstellungen und Fremdheitskategorien bei Rimbert, Thietmarvon Merseburg, Adam von Bremen und Helmold von Bosau, Orbis mediaevalis 5 (Berlin,2005); and Lisa Wolverton, Cosmas of Prague: Narrative, Classicism, Politics (Washington,DC, 2014).

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studies.5 Manuscript, or material, philology, is a way of thickly describingmedieval texts as constituted within a manuscript “matrix” that, as StephenNichols put it, speaks to the “social, commercial, and intellectual organizationat the moment of its inscription.”6 This methodology has been current in vernacu-lar literary studies, as well as early medieval history (especially Carolingianstudies), for some time now, and has more recently begun to emerge among scho-lars working on discourses of alterity and images of the East.7 Andrew Taylor’sstudy of the Oxford Roland manuscript (Bodleian Library, Digby 23) and theimplications of the famous epic’s inclusion alongside Calcidius’s translation ofPlato’s Timaeus, as well as Iain Macleod Higgins’s analysis of the manuscripttradition of Mandeville’s Travels, are examples of the way attention to contentand materiality have led to provocative new insights about some of the keyworks in the canon of medieval writing on the cultural and religious Other, par-ticularly how the reception and interpretation of a work can change as it is recop-ied into new manuscript contexts over time.8

5 An essential introduction is the article by Stephen G. Nichols, “Philology in a Manu-script Culture,” Speculum 65 (1990): 1–10.

6 Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel, eds., The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives onthe Medieval Miscellany (Ann Arbor, 1996), 1.

7 The work of Rosamond McKitterick and Walter Pohl, as well as that of their students,has been fundamental in reorienting the study of early medieval historiography around ori-ginal manuscripts. See, e.g., Rosamond McKitterick, History and Memory in the CarolingianWorld (Cambridge, 2004); Walter Pohl, Werkstätte der Erinnerung: Montecassino und dieGestaltung der langobardischen Vergangenheit, Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichischeGeschichtsforschung, Ergänzungs-Band 39 (Vienna and Munich, 2001); Helmut Reimitz,“Ein karolingisches Geschichtsbuch aus St. Amand: Der Cvp 473,” in Text, Schrift undCodex: Quellenkundliche Arbeiten aus dem Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, ed.Christoph Egger and Herwig Weigl, Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichts-forschung, Ergänzungs-Band 25 (Vienna, 2000), 34–90; Marek Thue Kretschmer, RewritingRoman History in the Middle Ages: The Historia Romana and the Manuscript Bamberg,Hist. 3, Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 36 (Leiden, 2007). Julia Crick’s pathbreakingstudy of the manuscripts of Geoffrey of Monmouth and in particular her analysis of thetexts associated with it — among which were a number of texts relating to the East — isanother key work in the field. See The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth,vol. 4, Dissemination and Reception in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 1991).

8 Iain Macleod Higgins, Writing East: The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia,1997); Andrew Taylor, Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and Their Readers(Philadelphia, 2002), chap. 2. See too Suzanne Yeager, “World Translated: Marco Polo’s LeDevisement dou monde, The Book of Sir John Mandeville, and Their Medieval Audiences,”in Marco Polo and the Encounter of East and West, ed. Suzanne Conklin Akbari, AmilcareA. Iannucci, and John Tulk (Toronto, 2008), 156–81. On the history and transmission ofMarco Polo’s Devisement du monde, see now Christine Gadrat-Ouerfelli, Lire Marco Polo auMoyen Âge: Traduction, diffusion et réception du Devisement du monde, Terrarum Orbis 12(Turnhout, 2015); and Consuelo Dutschke, “Francesco Pippino and the Manuscripts ofMarco Polo’s Travels” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1993).

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The formation and reproduction of discourses of cultural alterity, religious iden-tity, and historical change did not take place in response to an individual text orauthor so much as to clusters or convoys of texts, assembled in collections likeDarmstadt, Cod. 749, which were intended to be read and interpreted alongsideone another. Like early medieval chronicles, individual works on crusades, Sara-cens, pilgrimage, apocalyptic, and Orientalia more generally rarely traveledalone in medieval libraries; they were almost always assembled in dossiers of geog-raphy, historiography, or theology whose thematic coherence should be taken intoaccount if we are to appreciate how the individual works were actually read andinterpreted by medieval audiences.9 Albert Derolez has referred to the “associativeorganization” of encyclopedic compilations, like the Liber Floridus of Lambert ofSt.-Omer, where “mental associations evoked by one chapter become the subjectof the next.”10 As with Lambert’s great codex, the contents of a manuscript likeDarmstadt 749 do not necessarily follow a strict thematic or chronological order,but each individual work or text resonates with an image or idea suggested in oneof the other texts around it in a way that permits a reader to discern some of thelarger issues with which the copyist or compiler was concerned. Further accretionsand additions over time attest to the fact that the codex was known and remem-bered as a repository of material relevant to certain questions and discussionsabout pagans, Crusading, and Christianity in the East.

Many of these so-called Sammelhandschriften or receuils, particularly from thetwelfth and thirteenth centuries, would thus repay closer examination as wholeobjects used by scribes and their communities to negotiate the meanings andboundaries of cultural and religious difference in particular. Paolo Chiesa, forexample, has shown how material on fantastical voyages, the wonders of theEast, and saints associated with India, such as St. Thomas or Barlaam and Jose-phat, are often transmitted together in manuscript dossiers that he describes as“basi di conoscenza del mondo del tardo medioevo.”11 It is precisely in thecontext of these “knowledge bases,” combining often heterogeneous genres and

9 In addition to the introduction to Nichols andWenzel, eds., The Whole Book, see too thebrief but theoretically rich “Epilogue” by Ardis Butterfield in Le receuil au Moyen Âge: LeMoyen Âge central, ed. Yasmina Foehr-Janssens and Olivier Collet (Turnhout, 2010), 269–77.

10 The Autograph Manuscript of the Liber Floridus: A Key to the Encyclopedia of Lampertof St.-Omer, Corpus christianorum autographa medii aevi 4 (Turnhout, 1998), 182. I thank ananonymous reader for Traditio for suggesting Derolez’s formulation here.

11 “Il contributo dei testi agiografici alla conoscenza dell’oriente nel medioevo latino,” inTra edificazione e piacere della lettura: le vite dei santi in età medievale, ed. Antonelle Degl’In-nocenti and Fulvio Ferrari (Trent, 1998), 9–29, quotation on 27. See too Anežka Vidamanová,“Die mittellateinische ‘Belletristik’ als Mittel zum Kennenlernen von fremden Ländern imKönigreich Böhmen zur Zeit der Luxemburger,” in King John of Luxembourg (1296–1346)and the Art of His Era, Proceedings of the International Congress, Prague, September 16–20, 1996 (Prague, 1998), 46–52; Walter Pohl, “History in Fragments: Monte Cassino’s Politicsof Memory,” Early Medieval Europe 10 (2001): 343–374, at 350–51.

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texts, that we have to interpret medieval descriptions of Islam and the East, or ofthe exotic, non-Christian Other. Different communities of readers assembled textsin order to explore different associations and meanings within them. For the Cru-sades more specifically, we know from the research of Jay Rubenstein that medi-eval copyists carefully curated compilations of Crusader histories in an attempt topreserve the memory of heroic deeds as well as inspire new Crusaders to emulatepast greatness.12 Yet these same texts, like the chronicle of Robert the Monk, werenot only translated into vernacular languages and even versified, but couldmigrate from historical collections to theological/geographical miscellany, to endup as a basic travel guide to the Holy Land.13 What questions were the readersof these books asking, and what answers did they hope to find in the variousgroupings of Crusade literature, epic romance, geography, and theology that weencounter? Aside from studies like Rubenstein’s, which was able to situate itsmanuscript in a remarkably specific historical moment, we do not yet have aclear answer to such questions. In the following, however, I hope to demonstratean approach to such works in the context of their “associative organization” thatmight be extended to a variety of places and periods.

THE MANUSCRIPT

Darmstadt, Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, Cod. 749 originally belongedto the Benedictine abbey of Grafschaft, a reformed community situated roughlymidway between Cologne and Kassel in Westfalia. Grafschaft was founded byAnno II of Cologne in 1072 and settled with monks from Siegburg, his showcasereform monastery.14 The book is a modest octavo volume in a modern (nine-teenth-century) binding, measuring roughly 20 × 13 cm, whose leaves have beenpricked and ruled consistently throughout.15 Although the manuscript wasrebound in the nineteenth century, it still preserves on its first page (fol. 1v) anex libris and table of contents in a bold gothic hand of the fifteenth century —a strong indication that the modern rebinding did not fundamentally alter thecontent or order of the original material (see Fig. 1).16 The texts themselves arecontained in two major groups of gatherings (quaternions) that appear to have

12 Jay Rubenstein, “Putting History to Use: Three Crusades Chronicles in Context,”Viator 35 (2004): 131–68.

13 Cf. Thomas Martin Buck, “Von der Kreuzzugsgeschichte zum Reisebuch: Zur HistoriaHierosolymitana des Robertus Monachus,” Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwis-senschaft und Geistesgeschichte 76 (2002): 321–55.

14 “Grafschaft,” Germania Benedictina (St. Ottilien, 1980), 8:351–76, s.v.15 Die Handschriften der hessischen Landes- und Hochschulbibliothek Darmstadt (n. 1

above), no. 110, pp. 176–79.16 Fol. 1v: “Liber S. Alexandri in Grascaph … Expositio Rabani in libros Judith et

Hester; Vita Sci Heinrici imperatoris et miraculi; Passio S. Ignatii epi; Passio sci Thiemonis




been bound together in the mid- to late twelfth century. We may take some mater-ial relating to the Cologne archbishop Rainald of Dassel (d. 1167) in the last gath-ering (fols. 137–45) as a rough terminus post quem, but we cannot know for certainhow long after the composition or binding of the original contents it may havebeen added or if indeed it may have been part of the original conception of thecodex. About a dozen of the gatherings are palimpsests (with new ruling perpen-dicular to the old) of some otherwise unidentifiable theological and liturgicalworks from the ninth and tenth centuries.17 Never a wealthy monastery,Grafschaft had several other early manuscripts that show evidence of thiscommon salvage technique.18 With the exception of a few minor additions atthe end of the last gathering, all the works in the main sections of the codexwere copied in one or two very similar, consistent twelfth-century book hands.The book’s construction and coherence of material, along with the late-medievaltable of contents, should leave us with a high degree of confidence that it was

Figure 1: Darmstadt, Cod. 749, fol. 1r. Late-medieval ex libris and table of contents. Repro-duced with the permission of the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Darmstadt.

archiepi.; Narratio metrica de casu Theophili; Vita sce Pelagie metrica; Vita sce Euphrosine v[ir]ginis metrica; Et quedam alia ut patet i[n]spicie[n]ti.”

17 Wattenbach, “Handschriftliches” (n. 1 above), 622. See too Staub and Knaus,Hand-schriften (n. 1 above), 179 for further details.

18 Cf. Darmstadt, Codd. 752; 754.

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conceived and executed as a single project.19 One later addition, namely, anaccount of the miracles of St. Thomas of India copied onto extra space left onfols. 88v–89r, appears to date from late twelfth or early thirteenth century, sug-gesting that even after the main sections were complete, the book continued toserve as a place for copyists to insert material related to its broader themes.

The first eighty-eight folios consist of ten numbered gatherings copied in asingle hand and contain the commentaries on Esther and Judith by HrabanusMaurus (fols. 1–85r), some brief excerpts from Isidore’s Etymologiae (85v–86v)on rhetoric and oratory (mostly Book 2, chaps. 3–5), and, notably, the so-called“Crusade Letter” of archbishop Adelgoz of Magdeburg (86v–88v). Two laterhands (late twelfth/early thirteenth c.?) with more pronounced proto-gothic fea-tures recorded a text labeled Narratio de Miraculis S. Thomae (abridged versionof BHL 8146) on the remaining page and a half following the letter (88v–89r).A second section of the codex, consisting of eight (unnumbered) quaternions(fols. 89–145), and copied in the same hand as the first section, contains agroup of narrative saints’ lives: the Vita sancti Heinrici imperatoris (BHL3182), Passio S. Ignatii (BHL 4256), and the Passio Thiemonis by Heinrich ofBreitenau (BHL 8132).

The sections of exegesis and prose hagiography also feature consistent styles ofrubrication and, notably, characteristically large initial letters (six-line) at thebeginning of each text. Following these — again, in the same hand — there is ahagiographical corpus in verse ascribed to the monk Gevehard of Grafschaft.20

These include: metric reécritures of the De casu Theophili vicedomini, the VitaS. Pelagiae, and the Vita S. Eufrosiniae (fols. 117r–136v). On the last half-folioof 137v, and continuing on a new gathering (fols. 138r–139v), follow a briefmetric panegyric for the late Cologne archbishop Rainald of Dassel (136v–137r)by Gevehard, a laudatory poem addressed to abbot Nicholas of Siegburg(d. 1172) (134v–135r), and another letter-poem addressed to a monk of Soestabbey named Wernherus (135r–v).21 These verses are copied in a similar handas the rest of the preceding material. The last several folios, beginning on 140r,contain some letters from the congregation and an abbot of Grafschaft to arch-bishop Rainald (140r–143v), some verses on the legendary founding of Trier(143v–145r), and a story about an apparition that had appeared to the monks

19 Cf. too the observations of Wattenbach, “Handschriftliches,” 623: “Aber Material undSchrift sind ganz gleichartig, und sie müssen gleichzeitig entstanden und sehr früh verbundensein.”

20 Wattenbach first suggested that the metric saints’ lives were probably also by the sameauthor as the Epitaphium Rainaldi, that is, Gevehard. See “Handschriftliches,” 623. Forfurther discussion, see below, n. 123.

21 The Epitaphium Reinaldi is printed in Regesten der Erzbischöfe von Köln, ed. RichardKnipping (Bonn, 1901), 2:161.




of Affligem in Brabant (145v). These last three items are all in distinctly differenthands from the rest of the last gathering and appear somewhat younger. The storyabout Affligem is no longer legible but was published by Wattenbach in an appen-dix to his description of the codex.22

Stories about confrontations between Christians and pagans and/or Saracensseem to be a thread running through the selection of texts, particularly in twomain sections of the manuscript. The saints and other historical and biblicalfigures assembled here form a bulwark of heroic resistance against the violenceand madness of pagans. The manuscript’s compiler or compilers set out tocreate a compendium of hagiographically inflected salvation history from biblical

Table 1. Contents of Darmstadt, Cod. 749

Fol. Work Hand

1v–50v Hrabanus Maurus, Expositio in Librum Judith 150v–85r Hrabanus Maurus, Expositio in librum Hester (incl.

dedication to Queen Judith)1

85v–86v Isidore of Seville, excerpts from Book 2 of the Ety-mologiae on rhetoric and the arts

1

86v–88v Adelgoz of Magdeburg, Epistola ad Episcopos Saxo-niae et al.

1

88v–89r De miraculis S. Thomae apostoli (BHL 8146) 4, 589v–104v Vita S. Heinrici (BHL 3812) 1105v–113v Passio S. Ignatii (BHL 4256) 1114r–116v Heinrich of Breitenau, Passio S. Thiemonis (BHL

8132)1

116v–124r23 De casu Theophilii … metrica 1124r–129r Vita metrica S. Pelagiae 1129r–136v Vita metrica S. Euphrosinae 1136v–137r Epitaphium Reinaldi 1137v–138r Gevehard, Littera metrica ad Nicholam abbatum 1138r–139v Gevehard, Littera metrica ad Wernherem monachum 1140r–143v Letters from the community of Grafschaft to

Rainald of Dassel1&2

143v–145r Verses on the foundation of Trier 3145v–146r Vision from the monastery Afflighem ? (illegible)

22 Wattenbach, “Handschriftliches,” 628–29.23 Staub and Knaus, Handschriften, 177 (n. 1 above) erroneously gives the folio range as

116v–117r.

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antiquity to the recent past that could help contemporary readers place current(or recent) events, such as the Second Crusade and the call to forcibly convertthe West Slavs, in a broader context. These contents illuminate what must havebeen a broader problematic for monastic readers in Saxony or Westfalia in themid- to late twelfth century, namely, how to understand ongoing efforts torescue the Holy Land in relationship to traditional understandings of paganismand earlier Christian conflicts with idolatry and unbelief. While the writings ofindividual promoters and participants like Bernard of Clairvaux or Otto of Freis-ing have traditionally provided historians with insights about how contemporariesunderstood the various dimensions of the Second Crusade (and its failures), amanuscript like this one offers a heretofore unavailable opportunity to explorethe scribal and textual practices that shaped monastic (and perhaps clerical) per-ceptions about Christian and pagan identity.

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

It makes sense to understand the codex’s compilation as an attempt toplace the Wendish Crusade of 1147–48 — and perhaps the Second Crusade asa whole — into a larger historical and theological context. Scholars have increas-ingly come to recognize that, for contemporaries, the Second Crusade was morethan a targeted expedition to retake Edessa or defend the Latin Kingdom inthe East. Rather, it was conceived as a campaign of total war against unbeliefand threats to Christendom on at least three fronts.24 While the main armies ofLouis VII and Conrad III sought (unsuccessfully) to roll back Muslim advancesin the East, Eugenius simultaneously sanctioned crusades against Muslims inIberia, as well as against pagans beyond the Elbe River in Saxony. While thepurpose of this last campaign, launched in the summer of 1147, was to advancethe Christianization of the so-called “Wends” — a catchall term for the diverseconstellation of West Slavic peoples between the Elbe and Oder rivers — the pol-itics of this Transalbian frontier situated between the German, Danish, and Polishkingdoms had for several centuries been defined by a complex admixture of reli-gious violence, missionary zeal, and pragmatic accommodation.25

24 Giles Constable, “The Second Crusade as Seen by Contemporaries,” Traditio 9 (1953):213–79, repr. in Crusaders and Crusading in the Twelfth Century (Surrey and Burlington, VT,2008), 229–300 first made the case that twelfth-century writers had a much more expansiveview of the Crusade project than modern scholars tended to acknowledge. Constable’s viewhas since become a well-established framework for studying the Crusade, e.g., in JonathanPhillips, The Second Crusade: Extending the Frontiers of Christendom (New Haven, 2007).

25 On the Wendish Crusade, and the history of the German-Slavic frontier generally, thebest English-language treatment, in addition to Phillips, Second Crusade, 228–43, is FriedrichLotter, “The Crusading Idea and the Conquest of the Region East of the Elbe,” in MedievalFrontier Societies, ed. Robert Bartlett and Angus McKay (Oxford, 1989), 267–306.




The region between the Elbe and the Oder in northern Germany had been organ-ized as a series of marcher counties since the mid-tenth century when the Otto-nians reduced the Slavic tribes there to tributary status and erected a series offortifications and churches to promote Christianization.26 On the lower Elbe, bish-oprics were established at Mecklenburg, Ratzeburg, and Oldenburg for the Abro-dites and placed under the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, while, further south,new dioceses were created for the Liutizians at Havelberg and Brandenburg andsubordinated to the new archiepiscopal see created at Magdeburg in 968. Likethe pagan Saxons before them, however, the Slavic tribes engaged their strongerneighbors in a lengthy cycle of submission and resistance designed to optimizetheir autonomy.27 Some Slavic groups and their rulers embraced Christianityand cultivated close political relationships with their German counterparts andtheir churches, but others remained staunchly resistant to Christianization andsubmission to either Polish or German (and later Danish) influence. Major rebel-lions in 983, and again in 1066, led by pagan factions among the Slavic tribes leftthe northern marches and their churches in disarray for decades.28 While memor-ies of pagan atrocities against the Christians endured, only sporadic attempts weremade at retribution or reestablishing full control over the region.29 Bishop Burch-ard II of Halberstadt led a reprisal raid deep into Liutizian territory in 1068,returning with plunder that included a sacred white horse from the paganshrine at Rethra.30 In 1108, archbishop Adelgoz of Magdeburg (or his amanuensis)published a letter — preserved uniquely in Darmstadt, Cod. 749 and discussed infurther detail below — reminding readers of the outrages committed by the infi-dels and calling for all Germans to unite in a crusade to extirpate the pagan Slavsin imitation of the heroic knights who had recently liberated the Holy Land.31

This appeal failed to generate a coherent response, however. The local noblesseemed mostly content to establish rural settlements using peasant farmers

26 Timothy Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, 800–1056 (Harlow, UK, 1991),160–66; Gerd Althoff, “Saxony and the Elbe Slavs in the Tenth Century,” in The New Cam-bridge Medieval History (Cambridge, 2015), 3:267–92.

27 Althoff, “Saxony and the Elbe Slavs,” 280.28 Lotter, “Conquest,” 271–72.29 The chronicler Adam of Bremen provided a particularly vivid description of the vio-

lence that accompanied the 1066 uprising. See History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, 3.50 (49)–51 (50), trans. Francis J. Tschan (New York, 1959; repr. 2002), 157–58.

30 Gerold Meyer von Knonau, Jahrbücher des deutschen Reiches unter Heinrich des IV. undHeinrich des V., 7 vols. (Leipzig, 1890–1909), 1:585–86. Cf. Annales Augustana, MGH SS 3,128, s. a. 1068.

31 Giles Constable, “Early Crusading in Eastern Germany: The Magdeburg Charter of1107/8,” in Crusaders and Crusading, 197–214.

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recruited from other areas of northern Germany and to collect taxes and tributefrom the Slavic tribes under their jurisdiction.32

In 1144, the Turkish emir Zengi captured the strategically (and historically)crucial city of Edessa in northern Syria, prompting Pope Eugenius III tosummon a new crusade to help defend the Holy Land.33 Inspired by the preachingof Bernard of Clairvaux, Louis VII of France took the cross in March 1146, andConrad III, along with a large number of the German nobility, followed later inDecember of the same year.34 The dramatic setback of Christian fortunes in theLevant threw other forms of religious conflict into sharper relief, particularly inGermany. In the Rhineland, a Cistercian monk named Radulf, or Ralph, urgedhis listeners to take up the cross, but also encouraged attacks on Jews thatrevived memories of the devastating pogroms of the First Crusade.35 Arnold, thearchbishop of Cologne, opened the great fortress of Wolkenburg to the Jews ofthe city as mobs of Crusaders sought to destroy them.36 Bernard traveled toGermany in the fall of 1146 to silence Ralph, as well as to encourage Conrad IIIand other German nobles to join Louis VII on the expedition to the East.37

Conrad did eventually take the cross at Speyer in December 1146, but, at an imper-ial diet at Frankfurt the following spring (March 1147), Bernard met with anumber of Saxon nobles and afterward published a letter announcing a crusadeto conquer and convert the rebellious pagan Slavs east of the Elbe River.38

Bernard directed that “those nations should either be fully converted to the Chris-tian faith, or utterly exterminated,” and— apparently assuming in advance thathe spoke for the pope— that anyone who took up the cross against the pagan Slavs

32 Lotter, “Conquest,” 273–74, referring to the observation of Helmold of Bosau, Chron-icle of the Slavs, 1.56, ed. B. Schmeidler, MGH SS rer Germ. 23 (Hanover, 1937), trans. FrancisJ. Tschan (New York, 1935), 167, that they were mostly “accustomed to watch over the Slavsfor the purpose of increasing their incomes.”

33 Phillips, Second Crusade, 37–60.34 Regesta Imperii, vol. 4, 1.2, no. 421, accessed 24 March 2015, http://www.regesta-

imperii.de/id/1146-12-24_1_0_4_1_2_423_421.35 Phillips, Second Crusade, 84–88. Otto of Freising provides an extensive account of

Ralph’s preaching and Bernard’s efforts to combat it. See Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa,1.38(37)–39(38), trans. Christopher J. Mierow (New York, 1953; repr. 2004), 74–75. Whilethe forcible conversion of Jews was technically not permitted in Christian law, Jews wereincreasingly viewed in the twelfth century as a pernicious and destabilizing presence in Chris-tian society. On the place of Jews in the medieval Christian imagination, see Jeremy Cohen,Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Los Angeles and Berkeley,1999), and 147–66 in particular on the growth of anti-Judaism in the twelfth century.

36 Wilhelm Bernardi, Jahrbücher des deutschen Reiches unter Konrad III, 2 vols. (Leipzig,1883), 2:523.

37 Otto of Freising, Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa, 1.39(38)–40 (39), trans. Mierow, 74–76.38 Jean Le Clercq et al., eds., Sancti Bernardi Opera, 8 vols. in 9 (Rome, 1957–98), 8:pt. 2

(hereafter Epistolae), no. 457, pp. 432–33. See too idem, “L’Encyclique de saint Bernard enfaveur de la Croisade,” Revue bénédictine 81 (1971): 282–308.



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would receive the same plenary indulgence as those going to Jerusalem.39 Further-more, he forbade (“interdicimus”) the participants to enter into any pact with, orto accept payment or tribute from, the enemy until “with God’s help, either theirrite [viz. paganism], or their nation, is destroyed.”40

One month later in Dijon, Pope Eugenius received a delegation from theGerman kingdom that informed him about what had transpired at Frankfurt,and he issued another encyclical that acknowledged the broadened scope of theCrusade, which now aimed to combat the infidels not only in the Holy Landbut also in Spain and in the northern lands.41 The letter does not adopt Bernard’srhetoric about compelling conversion but does state that the aim of the northernCrusade would be to subjugate “Slavs and other pagans” to Christianity. Perhapsuneasy about having to endorse a project he had not been fully informed aboutfrom the start, and wary of the Saxons’ motives, he appointed one of theGerman envoys, bishop Anselm of Havelberg, as the official papal legate for theexpedition, encouraging him to maintain unity among the participants and seethat the Crusade advanced the conversion of the pagans.42

The historical motivations and theological justifications for launching a formalcrusade against the Wends — whether to destroy or convert them — are difficultto discern clearly, both in terms of the immediate situation on the Transalbianfrontier as well as in the context of the broader goals of the Second Crusade tothe east. Bernard of Clairvaux’s direct involvement in conceiving and setting inmotion the organization of a crusade against the Slavs has been the subject of agreat deal of study and debate. Friedrich Lotter, most notably, has suggestedthat Bernard did not envision the literal extermination of Slavs who did notembrace Christianity— which would have run contrary to longstanding Christianteachings against conversion under compulsion — but rather that he understood

39 “Et ad delendas penitus, aut certe covertendas nationes illas.” Bernard, Epistolae, no.432. On the Frankfurt diet and Bernard’s meeting with the Saxons, see Regesta Imperii, vol.4, 1.2 no. 446, accessed 24 March 2015, http://www.regesta-imperii.de/id/1147-03-13_1_0_4_1_2_448_446; and further, Hans-Dietrich Kahl, “Wie kam es 1147 zu einem Wen-denkreuzzug?” in idem, Heidenfrage und Slawenfrage im deutschen Mittelalter: AusgewählteStudien, 1953–2008 (Leiden, 2008), 623–32.

40 “Illud enim omnimodis interdicimus, ne qua ratione ineant foedus cum eis, neque propecunia, neque pro tributo, donec, auxiliante Deo, aut ritus ipse, aut natio deleatur.”Bernard, Epistolae, no. 433.

41 “Rex quoque Hispaniarum contra Saracenos de partibus illis potenter armatur, dequibus iam per Dei gratiam saepius triumphavit. Quidam etiam ex vobis tam sancti laboriset praemii participes fieri cupientes, contra Sclavos caeterosque paganos habitantes versusAquilonem ire, et eos Christianae religioni subiugare, Domino auxiliante, intendunt.” Divinidispensatione (JL 9017), PL 180:1203A. On this bull, see now Iben Fonnesberg-Schmidt,The Popes and the Baltic Crusades, 1147–1254, The Northern World 26 (Leiden, 2007), 31–34.

42 See too Jay T. Lees, Anselm of Havelberg: Deeds into Words in the Twelfth Century(Leiden, 1998), 78.

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the Crusade as an effort to reimpose Christian order on a people who had onceembraced it but then rebelled.43 Lotter’s views have not gained universalassent. Hans-Dietrich Kahl, for example, has argued that Lotter overlooked theeschatological significance of Bernard’s conceptual vocabulary in the Crusadeletter and his other writings that drew upon the Sybilline prophecies and thelegend of the Last Emperor.44 The so-called Tiburtine Sybil was a late Romanapocalyptic text that held that as the end times approached, a certain “C. rexRomanorum” would rise up to destroy the unbelievers and save Jerusalem.45

Kahl speculates that after Conrad agreed to participate in the expedition to Jeru-salem in December 1146, Bernard’s view of the Crusade took a dramatic new turn,and he began to see not just an opportunity to defend the Holy Land but to heraldthe end times themselves by advancing the conversion of the heathen. Thus whenBernard quoted Psalm 149:7 in his letter about God “taking vengeance against thenations” and “extirpating [them] from the land of the Christian name” (“adfaciendam vindictam in nationibus et extirpandas de terra Christiani nominis”),he referred not literally to the “land” of the Saxons but to the whole (Christian)world, which would be purified of the pagan rite.46 Kahl’s thesis is, to a largeextent, based on inference — Bernard never explicitly cites or refers to the Sybil-line texts— and other scholars, in particular Bernard McGinn, have taken a morecircumspect view of Bernard’s eschatological views.47 Cod. 749 does not containany overtly apocalyptic texts, which suggests that, at least in Grafschaft, theeschatological angle was not preeminent in their thinking about the Crusade.

43 See Lotter, “Conquest” (n. 25 above), 290–92, and, more expansively, idem, Die Kon-zeption des Wendenkreuzzugs: Ideengeschichtliche, kirchenrechtliche und historisch-politischeVoraussetzungen der Missionierung von Elb- und Ostseeslawen um die Mitte des 12. Jahrhun-derts (Sigmaringen, 1977), 38, 69, and passim.

44 Hans-Dietrich Kahl, “‘Auszujäten von der Erde die Feinde des Christennamens’:Der Plan zum ‘Wendenkreuzzug’ von 1147 als Umsetzung sibyllinischer Eschatologie,” inHeidenfrage und Slawenfrage, 631–64; idem, “Die Ableitung des Missionskreuzzuges aus sibyl-linischer Eschatologie: Zur Bedeutung Bernhards von Clairvaux für die Zwangschristianisier-ungsprogramme im Ostseeraum,” in Die Rolle der Ritterorden in der Christianisierung undKolonisierung des Ostseegebietes, ed. Zenon Hubert Nowak, Ordines Militares 1 (Torún,1983), 129–39. A brief, English-language précis of Kahl’s arguments in the above works isidem, “Crusade Eschatology as Seen by Bernard in the Years 1146–48,” in The SecondCrusade and the Cistercians, ed. Michael Gervers (New York, 1992), 35–41.

45 On the Sybilline tradition and the legend of the Last Emperor, see now HannesMöhring, Weltkaiser und Endzeit: Enstehung, Wandel und Wirkung einer tausandjährigenWeissagung, Mittelalter-Forschung 3 (Stuttgart, 2000).

46 Kahl, “Plan zum Wendenkreuzzug,” 148–49.47 Bernard McGinn, “St. Bernard and Eschatology,” in Bernard of Clairvaux: Studies

Presented to Dom Jean Le Clercq, Cistercian Studies 23 (Washington, DC, 1973), 161–95. Cf.too Möhring, Weltkaiser, 169–70 for a discussion of Kahl’s views, with which Möhring dis-agrees, as well as the remarks of Peter Dinzelbacher, Bernhard von Clairvaux: Leben undWerk des berühmtesten Zisterzieners (Darmstadt, 1998), 304.




Pegatha Jean Taylor, however, has recently underscored a different source ofmilitant evangelization and the ethos of martyrdom on the eastern frontier,namely, the writings of monastic and clerical figures like Bruno of Querfurt,Adalgoz of Magdeburg, and Adam of Bremen that grew out of the experience ofrepeated setbacks in the effort to establish permanent Christian institutionsacross Sclavinia.48 Monastic writers in twelfth-century Germany, along withBernard of Clairvaux himself, had been keenly interested in the relationshipbetween active evangelization and the monastic vocation. As Taylor elucidates,conversion, both the kind of internal, spiritual reform envisioned in the monasticlife and the evangelization of non-Christian people, came to have a special reson-ance for monastic writers in the Slavic bishoprics who saw the potential for per-sonal and religious renewal in preaching to the heathen (and sometimes dyingfor this preaching).49 Just as Bernard had advocated the synthesis of monasticand knightly vocations in the creation of the Knights Templar in the 1120s, soalso did he come to see the possibilities for religious renewal and reform — pos-sibly also in an apocalyptic key — in the project of converting the Slavs andsecurely bringing the lands of the north into Christendom. These sentimentsseem also to be those reflected in the composition of Cod. 749.

Whatever Bernard’s intentions may have been, the motives of the Saxonprinces and prelates themselves in the Crusade were even less clear. By the mid-1140s, there had not been serious conflict between Slavs and Germans along theElbe for nearly a decade, though Helmold of Bosau hints at ongoing pirateraids by the Slavs in Denmark that contributed to instability in the region.50

Albert the Bear of the Northmark enjoyed a close relationship with the ChristianSlavic prince of Brandenburg, Heinrich-Pribislaw, and Count Adolf of Holsteineven had a formal agreement at the time with Niclot, the pagan Slavic princeof Mecklenburg, to protect his interests in the region of Wagria, aroundLübeck, where a nascent Christian community had begun to flourish.51 Anselmof Havelberg himself, though he desperately wished to see his titular see

48 Pegatha Jean Taylor, “Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and the West Slavic Crusade: TheFormation of Missionary and Crusader Ideals on the German-Slavic Border” (PhD diss., Uni-versity of California, Berkeley, 1999), chap. 2. See too Hans-Dietrich Kahl, “Compellereintrare: Die Wendenpolitik Brunos von Querfurt” in Staub and Knaus, Handschriften (n. 1above), 183–210.

49 In addition to Taylor, “Bernard and the West Slavic Crusade,” chap. 2, which exploresthese issues in depth, see eadem, “Moral Agency in Crusade and Colonization: Anselm ofHavelberg and the Wendish Crusade of 1147,” International History Review 22 (2000): 757–84.

50 Chronicle of the Slavs (n. 32 above), 1.62, trans. Tschan, 175, also noted by Saxo Gram-maticus, Gesta Danorum, 14.2.1, ed. J. Olrik and H. Raeder, 2 vols. (Copenhagen, 1931),1:374. See Lotter, “Conquest,” 290.

51 Hans-Dietrich Kahl, Slawen und Deutsche in der brandenburgischen Geschichte des 12.Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (Cologne and Graz, 1964), 1:382–88.

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reestablished, may have harbored some reservations about the prospect of con-verting unbelievers by the sword, as opposed to preaching.52 Other contemporarysources that report on the Crusade cast a somewhat more jaundiced eye on theCrusaders’ agenda. The Magdeburg Annals, composed at the monastery Bergein Magdeburg, contain a clear, if somewhat more sharply formulated, paraphraseof Bernard’s directive, stating that the purpose of the expedition was “to subjectthem [viz. the Slavs] to Christianity, or, with God’s help, utterly annihilatethem.”53 The author describes the Crusade largely in terms of a plundering exped-ition that laid waste lands of the Slavs and burned their cities. Vincent of Prague’schronicle reported on the Crusader army that marched over the Lausitz into Pom-erania, where it besieged the town of Stettin (Szczecin). Vincent wryly observedthat the people of Stettin and their bishop had to inform the Crusaders thatthey had, in fact, already been converted by the preaching of Otto of Bamberg.54

The Crusade, such as it was, began in the summer of 1147 and concluded less thana year later with little accomplished. Niclot, furious that his erstwhile ally, Adolf ofHolstein, had failed to stop the Crusaders harrying his lands, launched a devastat-ing reprisal attack upon the settlements in Wagria. Helmold reports that at thesiege of the Slavic fortress of Demmin, the vassals of duke Henry the Lion andmar-grave Albert even remarked upon the irony of attacking the very people who pro-vided their lords’ incomes.55 He later observed that, following the Crusade, “theSlavs still perform sacrifices to their demons and not to God, and they continueto make piratical incursions into the land of the Danes.”56 If the Saxon armieshad been mobilized around Bernard’s Crusade encyclical and its eschatologicalvision, they appear to have largely disregarded it or at least failed to let it inspirethem to mount the grand imposition of Christian hegemony that it called for.57

We have no individual sources from Grafschaft that reflect on the outcome ofthe Crusade in the way Helmold and other annals and chronicles do, but Darm-stadt Cod. 749 is itself a key piece of evidence for the fact that at least one com-munity of Saxon-Westfalian monks attempted to organize a theological andhistorical response to the Crusade and the issues of conversion and martyrdomin particular. Though it did not lie directly on the frontier facing the threatfrom the pagans, Grafschaft would not have been isolated from discussionsabout the Crusade or its ramifications. Helmold of Bosau mentions that

52 Kahl, Slawen und Deutsche, 1:231. See too Lees, Anselm of Havelberg, 81.53 “Eos aut christiane religione subderet, aut Deo auxiliante omnino deleret.” MGH SS

XVI, 188.54 MGH SS XVII, 663. On Otto’s mission to the Pomeranians in the 1120s, see A.P.

Vlasto, The Entry of the Slavs into Christendom (Cambridge, 1970), 134–35. Stettin was theprincipal town and episcopal see of the Pomeranians.

55 Chronicle of the Slavs, 1.65, trans. Tschan, 180.56 Ibid., 1.69, trans. Tschan, 188.57 Kahl, Slawen und Deutsche, 1:225–35.




Westfalians were among those who had settled in Count Adolf ’s lands.58 The mon-astery’s direct superior at the time of the Crusade, archbishop Arnold I of Cologne(1138–51), had hosted Bernard during his preaching tour of the Rhineland, and,given the correspondence between the Grafschaft community and Rainald ofDassel that survives in the latter sections of Cod. 749, it is certainly reasonableto assume that they maintained a similar level of contact with previous arch-bishops. Monks from Grafschaft may have even seen Bernard preach in oraround Cologne and certainly may have known some of the knights and nobleswho went to fight in 1147.

Arnold I’s successor, the imperial chancellor Arnold of Wied (1151–56), hadaccompanied Conrad III to the east and was a close friend of both Anselm ofHavelberg and the abbot Wibald of Corvey, another eminent promoter of theWendish campaign.59 Arnold remained deeply committed to the ideology of cru-sading even after the dramatic failure of the Christian forces outside Damascusin July 1148. As archbishop-elect in 1151, Arnold dedicated a new church atSchwarzrheindorf, near Bonn, which contains a remarkable program of frescoesdepicting Ezekiel’s vision of the destruction of Jerusalem (Ezekiel 8) that AnneDerbes has shown to have strong connections to crusading ideology, particularlythe desecration of holy places and the pollution of idolatry.60 Though we ultimate-ly cannot trace the origins of Cod. 749 to a particular moment or individual, itclearly emerged from a theological-political milieu where questions of religiousviolence and conversion were being discussed and debated. The manuscript repre-sents a similarly creative and ambitious attempt to connect fighting against theSlavs with the Crusade against the Saracens in a way that made explicit thelongue durée of the struggle of God’s people against their enemies, alongside mira-cles of conversion and penance. Like the frescoes at Schwarzrheindorf, it presentsthe conflict between heroic Christians and vicious pagans as being at the core ofthe crusading project but, as will become clearer in the subsequent analysis ofthe individual texts below, progresses towards a resolution in which the readeris also obliged to contemplate the stories of saintly conversion and penitentialpiety. These concerns do not map precisely onto either Bernard’s or Eugenius’smotivations, it appears, but, as Taylor’s work has shown, they contributed toan ongoing discourse that attempted to reflect on Crusader militancy as a formof spiritual renewal. Moreover, it extends this thematic argument both

58 Chronicle of the Slavs, 1.57, 63, trans. Tschan, 168–69; 177–78.59 Lees, Anselm of Havelberg, 19–21; Konrad Lübeck, “Abt Wibald von Stablo und

Korvey und die Kölner Kirche,” Annalen des historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein 140(1942): 21–59. See too Heinz Wolter, Arnold von Wied: Kanzler Konrads III. und Erzbischofvon Köln (Cologne, 1973).

60 “The Frescoes of Schwarzrheindorf, Arnold of Wied, and the Second Crusade,” in TheSecond Crusade and the Cistercians (n. 44 above), 141–54; Wolter, Arnold von Wied, 51. BothWibald of Corvey and Otto of Freising were present for the dedication as well.

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chronologically and geographically in a way that underscores how contemporarieswere willing to think about crusading in terms even broader than perhaps indivi-duals like Bernard or Eugenius III had imagined.

THE TEXTS

As noted above, Cod. 749 consists of three distinct sections, the first two ofwhich were copied in the same hand and speak clearly to the themes of crusadeand religious violence between Christians and pagans. The texts seem to beordered along two chronological and thematic axes. They begin with the Old Tes-tament and the stories of Judith and Esther, then progress to more contemporarytexts, including the letter of Adelgoz, the vita of emperor Henry II, and the PassioThiemonis. At the same time, there may also have been an attempt to establish anarrative that grouped non-saints (Judith and Esther) and confessors (Henry)before the martyrs (Ignatius and Thiemo). To what extent the versified hagiog-raphies of Gevehard were meant to be part of this program is not clear, but, asdiscussed further below, they could have been intended to present an alternativeimage of conversion that contrasted with the confrontational and violentimages of the previous texts. The material relating to Rainald and the other frag-mentary texts found at the end of the book can probably be explained as the resultof a copyist using whatever free parchment he could find for his material in thelibrary.

Hrabanus Maurus’s commentaries on Esther and Judith were well known andcirculated widely from the ninth century onwards.61 Hrabanus originally con-ceived the commentaries as a gift to the empress Judith in the early 830s as con-solation for the trouble and sorrow she and her husband had recentlyexperienced.62 At the same time, Hrabanus held up the biblical queens Judithand Esther as exemplary female figures who, in their fortitude, prudence, andwillingness to sacrifice themselves for their people, prefigured the ecclesiaitself.63 However, these were also stories about how the ancient Israelites foughtpagan enemies and overcame them using extreme violence. Both Judith andEsther thus provided medieval Christians with a rich set of metaphoric imagesand allegories for any struggle of the Church against its perceived enemies, bothinternal and external.64

61 Stegmüller, Repertorium, nos. 7038–39, printed in PL 109:539–670.62 Mayke de Jong, “Exegesis for an Empress,” inMedieval Transformations: Texts, Power,

and Gifts in Context, ed. Esther Cohen and Mayke de Jong, Cultures, Beliefs and Traditions:Medieval and Early Modern Peoples 11 (Leiden, 2001), 69–100, esp. 88–89.

63 Ibid., 87–88.64 Cf. Benzo of Alba, Ad Heinricum IV, 4.38.5, ed. H. Seyffert, MGH SS rer. Germ. 65

(Hanover, 1996), 419; Manegold von Lautenbach, Liber ad Gebhardum, chap. 44,ed. K. Franke, MGH LdL 1 (Hanover, 1891), 388; Die Briefe des Petrus Damiani,




At the end of the Book of Esther, for example, Esther reveals Haman’s plotagainst the Jews to her husband, king Ahasuerus, and he permits the Jews todefend themselves and destroy their persecutors.65 Hrabanus observes that“this intention of Queen Esther, by which she strived mightily to pursue anddestroy her enemies, was the zeal and shrewdness of a true queen, that is, theholy church, which persecutes its enemies unceasingly, and fights to overthrowthem from their foundations and subject them to herself.”66 Similarly, afterJudith decapitates Holofernes, she pulls down the canopy above the bed andthrows the general’s mutilated body onto the floor, prompting Hrabanus toobserve that this was done “so that by this, soldiers of Christ [“bellatoresChristi”] might be confident that they are able to easily defeat even the wickedestenemy.”67 The significance of Holofernes’s defeat for later Christians was implicit,though Hrabanus seems to be casting the religious (i.e., monks or clergy) as themilitant Christians in this case. A similar notion may have lain behind the inclu-sion of an Anglo-Saxon versification of the book on Judith contained in theLondon Beowulf manuscript.68 While not dealing in monsters per se, it still pre-sents a hero(ine) overcoming a powerful foe with God’s help alone, culminatingin the dramatic decapitation of the dreaded general Holofernes.69

The figure of the pagan general Holofernes would have been an important onefor readers thinking about crusade and its spiritual and political implications inthe twelfth century as well.70 Orderic Vitalis, for example, reminded his readerswhen writing of Bohemund of Taranto’s capture by the Danishmend Turksthat even as God sometimes chastises the faithful for their sins, he will alsoprovide the means for their liberation, just as he did with — among manyother examples — Esther and Judith.71 Readers of William of Tyre’s account ofthe death of Zengi, who was killed in his tent by a servant while passed out

ed. K. Reindel, MGH Briefe der deutschen Kaiserzeit 4, 4 vols. (Munich, 1983–93), 4: no. 153,p. 38.

65 Esther 9:11–13.66 “Intentio haec reginae Esther, quia hostes suos valide insequi et exstirpare contendit,

stadium atque solertiam verae reginae, hoc est ecclesiae, exprimit, quae hostes suos sine ces-satione persequitur, et funditus prosternere atque subiicere certat.” PL 109:0666D.

67 “Sicque truncum hostis corpus evolvit, cum ipsum inimicum ex omni parte infirmumet debilem esse ostendit, ut eo facilius bellatores Christi confidant hostem nequissimum sevincere posse.” PL 109:0573B.

68 British Library, Cotton, Vitellius A.xv.69 Andy Orchard, Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript

(Toronto, 2003), 41. See too de Jong, “Exegesis for an Empress,” 96–97.70 For a discussion of Old Testament imagery and theology in the context of twelfth-

century Crusader chivalry, see D. H. Green, The Milstätter Exodus: A Crusading Epic (Cam-bridge, 1966), chap. 7 (“The Relevance of the Old Testament to the Medieval Present”).

71 Historia Ecclesiastica, 10.2, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1969),5:359.

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drunk, would also no doubt have inferred the parallels between Zengi’s demise andthat of Holofernes.72

The story of Judith had already been translated into German verse by the earlytwelfth century in a rather free adaptation of the biblical book that cast the pro-tagonist very much in the mold of an epic Romance heroine not unlike Roland.73

The only witness for the so-called Ältere Judith is a twelfth-century miscellanyfrom the Bavarian abbey of Vorau (est. 1163) that contains a number of importantMiddle High German verse texts, from the Kaiserchronik to the Ezzolied andPfaffe Lamprecht’sAlexanderlied, that formed a compendium of classical and bib-lical history alongside works dedicated to more contemporary events.74 A copy ofOtto of Freising’s Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa was later bound to it. Like Cod.749, Sammelhandschriften like Vorau, Cod. 276 illustrate how the stories ofJudith and Esther served as key exegetical reference points in biblical historythat helped contemporary readers place events like the Crusade in the broadercontext of salvation history.

The text in Cod. 749 to receive the most attention from scholars over the pastcentury is surely the Crusade Letter of Adelgoz, or the Epistola pro auxilio adver-sus paganos, a unique survival in this manuscript that sheds important light onthe evolution of Crusader thought in German lands in the twelfth century.75 Itsinclusion here is most likely due to the fact that archbishop Frederick I ofCologne (d. 1131) was one of the letter’s addressees; a copy was likely availableor was circulating in the twelfth century in and around institutions in the areaof Cologne with close contacts to the archiepiscopacy, and Grafschaft would cer-tainly have been among them. The text is an encyclical letter from archbishopAdelgoz of Magdeburg (1107–19) to a number of bishops and abbots of theGerman kingdom, as well as to “princibus, militibus, ministerialibus, clientibus,omnibusque maioribus et minoribus,” calling upon them to rise up and strikeagainst the pagan Slavs and seize their land, just as the Frankish Crusaders hadrecently done in the Holy Land. Based on the known dates of several of the indi-viduals addressed in the letter, it appears to have been composed around 1108. In

72 AHistory of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, 16.7, ed. A. C. Krey and E. A. Babcock, 2 vols.(New York, 1943), 2:146.

73 Deutsche Gedichte des XI. und XII. Jahrhunderts, ed. Josef Diemer (Vienna, 1849; repr.Darmstadt, 1968), 117–23. Cf. Green, Millstätter Exodus, 236.

74 Kurt Gärtner, “Vorauer Handschrift 276,” in Verfasserlexikon, 2nd ed. (Berlin andNew York, 1999), 10:516–21. See also vol. 11 (2004), 1638.

75 Urkundenbuch des Hochstifts Merseburg, ed. P. F. Kehr (Magdeburg, 1937), no. 91, p. 75.See in particular Constable, “Early Crusading” (n. 31 above), 203–14, which surveys theextensive body of twentieth-century scholarship on the text. For a close analysis of thetext, particularly its biblical imagery, see Marian Dygo, “Crusade and Colonization: YetAnother Response,” Quaestiones medii aevi novi 6 (2001): 319–25.




justifying his appeal to make war on the heathens, Adelgoz details the terriblecrimes and oppressions suffered by Christians when they fall into pagan hands:

Some they behead and sacrifice their heads to their evil gods. Of others, aftertheir entrails have been removed, they bind together the cutoff hands andfeet, and, mocking our Christ they say: Where is their God? Some otherswho have been raised on a gibbet, in order to increase their suffering,they allow to prolong a life that is more miserable than any death, sincewhile still alive they perceive their own suffering as each limb is cut off,and they are finally miserably eviscerated after the stomach is cut open.76

Part of this description echoes a passage from Adam of Bremen’s History of theArchbishops of Hamburg-Bremen wherein he recounts the brutal lynching ofbishop John of Mecklenburg by rebellious Slavs in the uprising of 1066, havinghis hands and feet cut off and his head fixed on a spear and offered as a sacrificeto the deity Redigost.77 Such images were apparently current among clericalwriters for a long while along the German-Slavic frontier. Helmold of Bosau,who used Adam’s text, recounts the death of John and also claims that tearingthe bowels out and winding them around a stake was a favorite punishmentinflicted by the pagan Slavs on their Christian victims.78

A number of scholars, most recently Giles Constable and Marian Dygo, haveobserved that this letter is an important witness to the development of newways of thinking about conquest and holy war in the Middle Ages.79 The ideologyof retaking and reoccupying the Holy Land was a fluid one that could be readilyadapted to situations such as that on the German-Slavic frontier, and Adelgoz’sletter suggests that contemporaries readily recognized the ways the First Cru-sade’s success could resonate with other enterprises. While Adelgoz, amongother inducements, holds out the prospect of taking and settling the lands ofthe unbelievers, he also makes it clear to his audience that they have an obligationto avenge crimes committed by the pagans against innocent Christians. Indeed, inaddition to its borrowings from Adam of Bremen, the letter of Adelgoz betraysstark affinities with the speech of Urban II in Robert of Rheims’s account ofthe First Crusade, particularly in its description of Saracen atrocities as well asin its promise of land and other material benefits for Crusaders.80 Whether, asPeter Knoch suggested, Adelgoz in fact made direct use of the Historia, or, asMarcus Bull and Damien Kempf have recently argued, they simply drew from a

76 Constable, trans., in “Early Crusading,” 211–12.77 History (n. 29 above), 3.50–51, trans. Tschan, 157–58.78 Chronicon Sclavorum (n. 32, above), bk. 1, chap. 52, trans. Tschan, 159–60.79 See above, n. 75.80 Robert the Monk,Historia Iherosolymitana, ed. and trans. Carol Sweetenham, Crusade

Texts in Translation 11 (Aldershot and Burlington, VT, 2005), 80.

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shared stock of rhetorical imagery or oral sources, the preservation of the letter inCod. 749 was certainly meant to draw, in Derolez’s term, associative connectionsbetween accounts of pagan violence in the present and the past.81

This underscores how images of pagan atrocities were remarkably fungibleacross a variety of contexts and that at least part of what motivated crusadingwas the desire to acquit and avenge crimes and cruelty practiced against Chris-tians. As Daniel Baraz has observed, contrary to popular assumptions aboutthe banal nature of medieval cruelty, gruesome torture and images of pain werediscourses of otherness, designed to elicit strong emotional reactions and spurpeople to demand justice and vengeance against an enemy who had violated thenorms of humanity.82 The compiler of Cod. 749 wished to foreground theseinstances of extreme cruelty, making an implicit argument about the connectionbetween paganism, barbarism, and Christian sacrifice that brought the element ofrighteous vengeance within Crusade ideology into sharper focus.

Adelgoz also situates his broader argument within an exegetical frameworkthat, as Constable noted, sought to place the “undertaking in biblical termsand in relation to biblical events brought into the present.”83 While he does notquote directly from Judith or Esther, the themes of violence and resistance to reli-gious persecution that lay at the center of the letter’s message connect profoundlywith the allegorical images of the persecuted Church at the heart of Hrabanus’scommentaries on the two Old Testament books. Miriam Dygo likewise has under-scored the way the letter’s rhetoric links the potential settlement of Slavic landsby Christians to the Israelites’ taking of the Holy Land in the book of Joshuaand images of the terra promisionis elsewhere in the Old Testament.84 The compilerof Cod. 749 did not include the letter along with Hrabanus’s commentaries merelyto reiterate or recapitulate ideas contained in them but to focus attention on whatthe letter left out: after the Promised Land is taken, the chosen people — theChurch — still must defend itself, a notion that would have no doubt focusedminds in the wake of the loss of Edessa in 1144 and perhaps more so in thedecades after the inglorious conclusion of the Second Crusade.

The inclusion of the Bamberg vita of Emperor Henry II, a lay ruler and confes-sor, may appear at first glance to be an outlier in a collection of biblical exegesis,martyrdom, and Crusade-related material. However, when considered alongsidethe immediately preceding texts in the manuscript, themes of pagan violence

81 Peter Knoch, “Kreuzzug und Siedlung: Studien zum Aufruf der Magdeburger Kirchevon 1108,” Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel-Ostdeutschlands 23 (1974):1–35; The HistoriaIherosolimitana of Robert the Monk, ed. Marcus Bull and Damien Kempf (Rochester, NYand Woodbridge, UK, 2013), xxxv–xxxviii.

82 Medieval Cruelty: Changing Perceptions; Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period(Ithaca and London, 2003), 8–10.

83 Constable, “Early Crusading,” 210.84 Dygo, “Crusade and Colonization,” passim.




and war against the Slavs found in Adelgoz’s letter suddenly appear to fall intosharper relief and the associative salience of the codex’s contents once againbecomes evident.85 The text, based on a dossier produced in Bamberg in themid-1140s supporting the canonization of the last Ottonian emperor, portraysHenry as a confessor insofar as he used his position to fight for the Church, par-ticularly against the pagan Slavs and (barely Christian) Bohemian and Polish pol-ities that threatened the borders of his kingdom.86 Early in his reign, for example,the vita tells us that he convened a diet at Quedlinburg where he decided to fightback against the “Poles, Bohemians and other Slavs in nearby regions who werelaying waste to the border areas of the kingdom.”87 Near Walbeck, Henrysurveys the damage wrought by the barbarians and swears an oath, dedicatinghis victory in the coming battle to Saints Lawrence (the patron of nearby Merse-burg), George, and Hadrian (See Fig. 2).88 Naturally, the barbarians are van-quished and Henry restores the diocese of Merseburg to its former glory.89

Henry embodies precisely the qualities of a Christian holy warrior that theletter of Adelgoz calls on both clerics and laymen of every status to emulate infighting the Slavs.

Henry’s canonization coincided with the launch of the Second Crusade in 1146,and some scholars have speculated that Conrad III’s involvement in raising one ofhis predecessors to sainthood laid the groundwork for his own participation in acrusade.90 According to the author of the dossier of miracles assembled tosupport the case for Henry’s sainthood, Conrad III made a personal appeal inthe matter to Eugenius III on behalf of the cathedral of Bamberg, of which he

85 Vita sancti Heinrici regis et confessoris und ihre Bearbeitung durch den BambergerDiakon Adelbert, ed. Marcus Stumpf, MGH SS rer. Germ. 69 (Hanover, 1999). The versionin Darmstadt 749 is the so-called “Fassung I.” See Renate Klauser, Der Heinrichs- und Kuni-gundenkult im mittelalterlichen Bistum Bamberg (Bamberg, 1957), 71–74.

86 See Stumpf, “Einleitung,” inVita Sancti Heinrici, ed. idem, 32–48; and Klauser,Hein-richs- und Kunigundenkult, 71. On Henry’s legacy as leader in the Christian expansion to theeast (particularly among Slavs and the Hungarians) in the context of his canonization in1146, see Phillips, Second Crusade (n. 24 above), 92.

87 Vita Sancti Heinrici, chap. 3, ed. Stumpf, 234–35.88 Lawrence’s patronage in Merseburg was itself attributed to the battlefield oath made

by Otto I at the Lechfield in 955 to create a bishopric dedicated to the Roman martyr if hedefeated the Hungarians. See Vlasto, Entry of the Slavs into Christendom (n. 54 above), 147.

89 Vita Sancti Heinrici, chap. 4, ed. Stumpf, 235–39. As noted by Stumpf, “Einleitung,”36, this episode in the vita conflates a number of campaigns against the Poles and Slavs overthe course of Henry’s reign into a single, epic battle described in terms not unlike a crusade.The vita passes over the fact that Henry actually fought the Poles in an alliance with thepagan Liutizi. See Hans K. Schulze, “Eine unheilige Allianz: Was die QuedlinburgerAnnalen zum Jahre 1003 berichten und was sie verschweigen; das Osterfest zu Quedlinburgund das Bündnis Heinrichs II. mit den heidnischen Slawen,” Quedlinburger Annalen 6(2003): 6–13. See too Klauser, Heinrichs- und Kunigundenkult, 73.

90 Phillips, Second Crusade, 228–43.

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himself, like Henry, had been an important patron.91 Elevating the status ofBamberg was probably a more immediate goal for Conrad than anything relatingto the Crusade, which was then in the earliest stages of its inception. Eugenius

Figure 2: Darmstadt, Cod. 749, fol. 91r., ex Vita Heinrici imperatoris. The text to the left ofthe marginal ticks reads: Congregato itaque exercitum contra predictas nationes aciem direxit.Et faciens transitum per locum qui Walbech dicitur, gladium sancti Adriani martyris qui proreliquis ibi multo tempore servabatur accepit.

91 Regesta Imperii, vol. 4, 1.2 no. 342, accessed 26 March 2015, http://www.regesta-imperii.de/id/1145-06-16_1_0_4_1_2_343_D342, citing Adalberti miracula s. Heinrici,MGH SS IV, 813. See too Klauser, Heinrichs- und Kunigundenkult, 51, who argues thatConrad’s efforts were aimed at compensating for his failure to be crowned emperor.



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announced Henry’s formal canonization in March 1146, shortly before Louis VIItook the cross at Vezelay and well before Bernard had begun his preaching tour ofthe German lands.92 It was not until December of 1146 that Conrad seriouslyentertained the prospect of taking up the cross, but the monks of Grafschaftperhaps saw a connection between Henry’s (albeit misleading) legacy as a Slav-fighter and the Wendish Crusade imagined in the Letter of Adelgoz. Henry hadbeen a Wendish Crusader avant la lettre.

The dramatic contest between Christian virtue and pagan arrogance is funda-mental to early Christian martyr narratives, but few hagiographic texts fore-ground the Christian polemic against paganism like the Passion of Ignatius.Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, was an early Christian apologist and martyr con-demned by the emperor Trajan in the early second century and distinguishedby his eagerness to face the wild beasts in the Roman Coliseum.93 According tothe account of his condemnation and death passed down in the later Passio, Igna-tius famously defied the order of the emperor Trajan for all subjects of the empire,pagan and Christian, to offer sacrifices to the gods, and, when the emperor arrivedin Antioch and heard about Ignatius’s defiance, he ordered the bishop arrested.Following an inquest in which Ignatius boldly denounced the emperor’s paganbeliefs, he was sentenced to die ad bestias in Rome.94

The Latin recension of the Passio Ignatii transmitted in Cod. 749, the so-called“Bollandist version,” appears in a number of legendaries and martyrologiesthroughout France, Flanders, and the German lands from the ninth centuryonwards.95 Its primary feature is a series of lengthy dialogues between Ignatiusand Trajan about paganism and the truth of Christianity.96 According to thePassio, following his arrival in Rome, Ignatius was summoned again by Trajan

92 JL 8882.93 W. R. Schoedel, “Polycarp of Smyrna and Ignatius of Antioch,” in Aufstieg und Nie-

dergang der römischen Welt, 2nd series, vol. 27.1 (New York and Berlin, 1993), 272–358. Thevast majority of scholarly material on Ignatius is dedicated to the theological significanceof his letters, not the accounts of his martyrdom, which are of a much later date andlargely fictitious.

94 BHG 813, in J. B. Lightfoot, ed. and trans., The Apostolic Fathers, vol. 3, pt. 2(London, 1889), 477–94 (Engl. trans. 575–79).

95 Martyrium Ignatii Latinum alterum siue Bollandianum (compilatum ex Actis Antioche-nis et Romanis graece conscriptis) (BHL 4256) = AA SS Feb. 1, cols. 29–33. On the manu-scripts, see http://bhlms.fltr.ucl.ac.be/querysaintsection.cfm?code_bhl=4256, accessed 23October 2014. This recension, the earliest witness for which dates to the ninth century,appears to be a reworking (and elaboration) of an earlier sixth-century Latin account of Igna-tius’s martyrdom edited by J. Mallet and A. Thibaut, Les manuscrits en écriture bénéventine dela Bibliothèque capitulaire de Bénévent, 3 vols. (Paris, 1984–97), 1:283–85; 287–90. See too thediscussion by Lightfoot, ed., The Apostolic Fathers, 371–73.

96 A. Bolhuis, “Die Acta Romana des Martyriums des Ignatius Antiochenus,” VigiliaeChristianae 7 (1953): 143–53.

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to appear before the Senate to defend his actions — a tableau that, of course,affords the bishop an opportunity to discourse on Christian theology andattack paganism.97 As Ignatius stubbornly refuses again and again to yield andsacrifice to the pagan gods, Trajan orders more savage tortures to be applied:that his body be raked with hooks and sharp stones; that his hands be searedwith fire; that burning strips of oil-soaked papyrus be applied to his body; thathe be roasted on a bed of coals, and so on.98 Finally, Trajan asks Ignatius toexplain the faith that has made him able to endure such torment. But since hestill will not abjure his religion, the emperor and Senate sentence Ignatius todeath. Trajan nonetheless remains so impressed by the martyr’s comportmentthat he allows Ignatius’s remains to be taken away for burial and, later, in hisfamous correspondence with Pliny the Younger, urges the governor to deal leni-ently with accused Christians.

ThePassio Ignatii here serves a similar function to theVita sancti Heinrici in pro-viding a broader ideological and historical context for Adelgoz’s call to arms. Thebrutal torments suffered by its protagonist are not dissimilar to the atrocities attrib-uted to the pagan Slavs, or, as shown below, suffered by archbishop Thiemo at thehands of his Saracen captors. He was also a bishop. This represents another import-ant thematic link that connects the Passio with both the Letter of Adelgoz and thePassio Thiemonis immediately following it. Adelgoz, to be sure, was not the victimof a martyrdom, but the letter certainly underscores his initiative as an archbishop,and it was addressed primarily to the other prelates of northern Germany andimperial Francia at the time.99 It also draws the reader from a milieu focused onthe Slavic frontier towards the east and the Mediterranean, specifically Ignatius’ssee of Antioch. Even though his martyrdom eventually takes place in Rome, Igna-tius’s story begins in Antioch, which remained an important Christian possession inthe east during the Crusades and featured prominently in some of the earliest andmost influential Crusade romances, particularly the Chanson d’Antioche.100 Whenthe Turkish general Nur ed-Din killed prince Raymond of Antioch and threatened

97 The confrontation or debate between the martyr and pagan judge was a feature of theearliest martyr accounts, beginning with Polycarp. See Hippolyte Delehaye, Les passions desmartyres et les genres littéraires, 2nd ed., Subsidia Hagiographica 13b (Brussels, 1966), 254–73,and on interrogations by the emperor personally, 245–46.

98 On various topoi of torture, see Delehaye, Les passions des martyres, 273–87. ThomasSizgorich also drew attention to these graphic depictions of torture in his Violence and Beliefin Late Antiquity: Militant Devotion in Christianity and Islam (Philadelphia, 2009), and inparticular their role in forging narratives of communal history and identity. See esp.chap. 2, “The Living Voice of Kindred Blood: Narrative, Identity, and the Primordial Past.”

99 Cf. Constable, “Early Crusading” (n. 31 above), 199.100 See Carol Sweetenham, “Chanson d’Antioche,” in Encyclopedia of the Medieval

Chronicle, ed. Graeme Dunphy, Brill Online, s.v., accessed 12 May 2016, http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopedia-of-the-medieval-chronicle/chanson-dantioche-EMCSIM_00433.



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the city in 1149, it led both Eugenius and Bernard to call for yet another crusade,though, perhaps unsurprisingly, without success.101

There is no evidence that these particular events spurred a sudden interest inIgnatius’s cult, in this manuscript or elsewhere, but the Antiochene setting pro-vides a nuanced, yet critical, association with the story of Thiemo, a bishopwho died in Saracen captivity somewhere in either Anatolia or Egypt. While scho-lars have noted the resonances between Adelgoz’s letter and Urban II’s speech inRobert the Monk’s Historia, none have yet drawn attention to the fact that theyalso appear in a manuscript with the Passion of Archbishop Thiemo, a Crusade-eramartyr whose torture and death testified to the pagan (in this case Turkish orSaracen) penchant for cruelty.102 Archbishop Thiemo of Salzburg, a long-sufferingpartisan of the reform papacy in Bavaria, was one of the more prominent parti-cipants in the so-called Crusade of 1101, an ill-fated expedition led by duke WelfIV of Bavaria and the margravine Ita of Babenberg that sought to bolster thenascent Latin presence in Palestine following the surprising success of the FirstCrusade.103 When most of the German army was wiped out by the Seljuks inan ambush near Heraclia (Eregli) in Asia Minor, Thiemo was among thosetaken prisoner. Ekkehard of Aura and Albert of Aachen both devote considerableattention to this so-called “rear Crusade” and its dramatic failure but include nospecific information about Thiemo’s ultimate fate beyond noting that he was cap-tured along with many others.104 By the mid-twelfth century, however, a legendhad emerged in certain parts of the German kingdom that held that, followinghis capture, Thiemo was brutally tortured and executed when he willfully

101 Phillips, Second Crusade (n. 24 above), 269–72.102 BHL 8132: Passio Thiemonis auct. Heinrico Abbate Breitenowens

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